I've written earlier on this blog on the Woolwich works ("Very, Very Heavy Metal--the Woolich Infant, 1876") that touches on some very heavy artillery, superior monsters all, with the "Infant" in question being an 80-ton gun. That came to mind seeing this big full-page engraving in Scientific American of Woolwich in 1879 and this stationary parade of potential of death and destruction (and we're glad to have them on our side) 700-lb shells. That's Sir William Palliser shells, which were manufactured as armor-piercing, and intended to do major damage to armor-plated warships--hyper-damage, actually, considering the 410-pounder in this variety was very highly effective. This shell was just an absolute brute.

This is a detail from:

[Apologies for the waviness--the book is very large and getting it to lay flat was not really a consideration.]

Inventors had been experimenting with the electric light for decades before Thomas Edison patented his ever since it in the same year that this engraving appeared (1879). Ever since is became possible to believe in the practicality of the power source of electricity (rather than the very problematic gas) with the demonstrate of Humphrey Davy's electric arc lamp in 1809, people like Lindsay (1835) and Geisler (1856) and Becquerel (1867) and Woodward (1875) and many others tried to perfect the form of electrical lighting. Edison of course came up with the best idea, and the rest is history (and adjudication).

It is really no that long ago--in my great-great grandfather's time--that the possibility of the expansion of lighting by electricity was new and very exciting (as well as the delivery of electricity for other stuff, but that is another story). It is also a time of tremendous achievement in delivering the power, which really only extends backwards to 1820 with Oersted (and his electromagnetic motor, and the thought of seeing a land locomotive for providing portable electricity must have been an enormous intellectual treat. And here it is:

[Source: Scientific American, Supplement, June 7, 1879; apologies for the uneven lighting, but the book was big and thick and making the surface flat was out of the question.]

As stated in the short article, this is a "very convenient arrangement" for delivering lighting remotely ("to contractors"), and was produced by Gainborough's Marhsall, Sons & Co. for the electrical engineering firm of Crompton & Fawkes of London. The dynamo-electric machines are on the small two-wheeled carriage and is connected to the steam-powered source on the four-wheeled carriage; it was a 6hp engine that could produce 6,000 candle power illumination. To the right of the electric engines are spools with 300 yards of cable which would connect everything to the electric lamps--evidently from arrival to light would take one hour. For the time this was a magical thing.

Oh bloody hell--was there anyone as tough as Douglas Mawson? The impossible situations he survived for months on end are just, well, impossible. He just kept going in the most extreme environment in the Antarctic in the face of long and endless perdition--and won. And to be honest I'm not sure who claims him--the Brits because he was born there, or the Aussies because he emigrated with his folks when he was two years old--but I'd fight for him being mine whatever the position on the globe I was in. I've read Mawson's Will by Lennard Bickel and also parts of his own The Home of the Blizzard (available at Project Gutenberg but it reads much better with an older print version, so you can feel its big chunkiness in your hands). The books are both about his 1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which Sir Edmund Hilary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history", and which is no overstatement.

So when I discovered that I had a small publication from the Geographical Journal (September 1914) by Sir Douglas called "The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914" I was pretty excited. It is short (29pp) but it seems to be the first time that he addressed the expedition in any detail; it is first-person and very concise, nearly so to the point of brittleness. And it has a couple of killer folding maps (large folding ones for King George V Land and Adelie Land) to illustrate the trek. There's also a do-not-stand-in-my-way portrait of Mawson, who recounts the trek and what was supposed to be the charting and geological/glaciological reconnaissance of the 1500-mile Antarctic coast southward of Australia. Then there was the tragedy, and his 160km 30-day solo march through The Bad Stuff.

You can read the article online via Wiley and JSTOR by following this link http://www.jstor.org/stable/1778688?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents and getting a JSTOR permit. If you don't have an account that includes JSTOR, it is well worth the effort of signing up for the free stuff that it offers.

There are three film clips in existence for the expedition, found at Australian Screen: http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/home-blizzard/

July 15, 2015

Another interesting portrait within a photograph--this is one in a long series of images from the blog's WWI News Photo Service Photography section, which can be found here and which will explain the purpose of pool photography during the War. This image (explained in the original paper caption below) was made somewhere along the front at the intersection of French and Belgian lines. The soldiers are gathered around a sentry post, enjoying some light time.

About eight months after the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima the Jesuit Rev. John A.Siemes contributed his well-known first-hand account of the devastation that he found there hours after the event. Siemes also published his story in the Irish Monthly, volume 74 (#873, pp 93-104) in 1946. This 10-page account in this version evidently is not very widely kept in libraries worldwide, as WorldCat locates only two copies (one at "New York State Library" and another at the Peace Collection of Swarthmore). There are full-text versions of it online, though there are differences in the telling of the story--Yale University has this as a full-text version posted at their Avalon Project here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp25.asp It is well worth a read.

The original publication is available for purchase via the blog's bookstore, here.

I really enjoy looking at old photos with a magnifying glass, finding the pictures within the picture, until it is micro-images all the way down. It is odd "coming out" of them, sometimes, and then looking at the full image, and in some sense feeling utterly at a loss to try and find where you had just been in great detail.

Here's an example with this great photo of the French Blue Devils on parade at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. These soldiers were and are elite mountain infantry, the Chassons Alpins, "Alpine Hunters", and nicknamed "the Blue Devils", and who saw their fair share of combat during WWI. They made a tour of the U.S.at the beginning of the War in a fund raising drive, and evidently did so again, at least in this instance, showing up in New York in May 1918.

This is a news photo service photograph (see here for the story) and is accompanied by this text which was supposed to be used along with the image when purchased for publication in a newspaper or magazine.

July 14, 2015

Here's an interesting combination of sweat and electricity--an enormous electrical device that was on display in an exhibit of "natural magic" at the Colosseum in Regent's Park in 1839. The large disk that the two guys are turning is actually larger in real life, being 7' in diameter, the conductor being varnished copper, and the conducting balls being gilded--it must have been a very shiny experience, especially when they generated their electric spark. In 1839 this was the largest electrical generating device in the world. (I have a tiny version of that device here, something made out of old records coated with copper and found ball glasses acting as Leyden jars, all painted and varnished, the work of an 8 year old in 1925 who went on to a career in astronomy and became the most celebrated eclipse follower in the mid 20th century.)

This monster is made just 39 years after Volta's first battery was made, and not long after Oersted generated the first magnetic field from an electric current in 1820, the same year as Ampere's solenoid. There were many quick and brilliant development from then to 1839 (also the year in which Daguerre perfected his collaborative work with Niepce to produce the photographic camera), not the least of which was the Davidson's creation of the first electric motor car/land locomotive, again in that same full year of 1839:

July 13, 2015

[There have been 99 posts to this blog since June 1--check out other work via the "Archive" at left]

In the 100+ or so posts in the Atomic/Nuclear Weapons history thread there are a number that address somewhat Outsider-y notions and imaginary insights into the weapons. There are some that prophesy the advent of the bomb, and some that initiate the creator in its creation. The pamphlet below (published in DeRidder, Louisiana, in 1947, a town of 4,000) is one such example--the atomic bomb so far as I can tell exists only allegorically, as in the greed bomb, that would destroy us all. Still, it has a mushroom cloud on the cover, and so it qualifies as an atomic-bomb-in-popular-culture item.

[There have been 99 posts to this blog since June 1--check out other work via the "Archive" at left]

One thing is for certain--the design of this Civil Defense ("trained helpfulness") pamphlet issued by Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania was very determined, and obvious, and provocative, and it may have been the best thing about this publication. It is not clear to me how much of the plans for reacting to a nuclear attack ("an atomic Pearl Harbor") were implemented or implementable when this work was printed (ca. 1950?), but the plans were certainly orderly--and so they seem in the maps of action.

Here's one interpretation of an action plan for Armageddon in a large city--it is a bare-bones, comforting plan,even though it looks like half of the map is missing (though it isn't); it is really just a suggestion about the course of action after an attack:

All it shows, really, is that something is going to happen.

Here's another vision of action, this taking place in a small Pennsylvania town "100 miles away" from bombed centers:

There are no plans for the population to go anywhere, though there are plenty of plans for convoys going to the bombed areas. Also there's plenty of expectation, what with a hospital, temporary hospital, mass care center, and a golf course dedicated to mass care for evacuees--there would be plenty of people being removed to the town (as hospitals "prepare(d) extra beds").

There wasn't much in this pamphlet about what to actually do in the event of an (ultra) emergency, though you were told that people would respond to calls--telephone calls. As a matter of fact the phone features largely in this pamphlet:

Maybe it was all about selling telephones--as in would you be ready to receive The Big Call if it was made?

July 12, 2015

When can you get seven "complete books" into one volume...of 126pp? And be printed in a legible font? Well, you can't, really, even when you scream it on your own book--unless those books of course are really short stories, or really short stories. For example, Hubbard's "Message for Garcia" is complete but it is hardly a book at 400 words or so. How these short stories could have been offered for six bucks (in 1940) I don't know.

Actually the seven REAL books ("and others!" are reprinted in 105 pages--the last 21 pages are filled with psalms, the Gettysburg Address, "Gungda Din", "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", and ten others, to fill out the rest of the book.

In any event, I liked this little pamphlet for its odd design, "special" typeface, book titles, and color. Did I mention color?

Mind Your Stops! Punctuation Made Plain and Composition Simplified for Readers, Writers, and Talkers, was a slim volume produced in the U.S. version of the "Sixpenny Library" series, with this version published in New York City by Dick & Fitzgerald in 1855. (It cost 13 cents in the U.S.) It is small (5x4 inches or so) and 32 pages long, and promises a lot, ("Hard Words Made Easy"). There is nothing particularly eventual that takes place in this work, at least from what I can fast-read. The main concern here is the comma (pp 6-16), which takes up about a third of the work and is but one of ten punctuation marks. (Here are a bunch of them in case I've forgotten to use some here--I know there are too many,but you may keep the others for a rainy day===> ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Also included are the colon (pp 16-18), the period (18-20), the dash (20-25), the stopped-dash (25-26), the long dash (26-28), the hyphen (28-29), the note of interrogation (29-30), the note of admiration (30-31), the marks of quotation (31-32), and then all by it self in a lonely half-page or so, the parenthesis (on page 32).

I'm reproducing this mostly for the cover. Oh: and for some reason only two copies of this work are located in WorldCat, both at the British Library.

A review from Mechanics Magazine, (Volume 63) edited by John I Knight, Henry Lacey,, which appeared in 1855:

July 10, 2015

See the WWI Photography section for more images and for an explanation of the source of the photographs.

This is a photograph of an aid station somewhere along the Western Front, 1917. Given the amount of digging going on throughout the course of the war, with the construction of hundreds of thousands of miles of trenches, and then the sapper war to tunnel underneath the tunnels and so on, it is quite possible that this underground shelter was dug out by hand. This is also an insight to the duration of some of those battles--to construct such a station impervious to possibly semi-continuous bombardment meant that the lines of battle were static, with many of the major engagements of hundreds of thousands of soldiers lasting for months, and in some cases, years.

The expressions here are difficult, and difficult to actually recognize as anything that isn't exhaustion. There is a lot of "blankness" in the faces, a deep weariness.

This scene is a detail from the larger and full image (which is also for sale at the blog's bookstore, here):

July 09, 2015

The list below is part of a workbook/artwork created in ca. 1820-1830 or so--it is a wishbook of sorts, a daydream collector. There are a number of questions that the author asks of herself (wishes for a small and pretty foot and such are among the many hints) and provides 40 answers for each. The questions and answers are lovely, and revealing.

The questions include:

"By Whom are You Beloved?"

"What is Your Disposition?"

"For What Are You Admired?"

"Will You Marry or Not, and Why?"

"What is Your Life's Passion?"

"What Do You Most Figure Yourself Upon?"

What is Your Most Ardent Wish?"

Tonight though I would just like to look at one, the last question:

And just in case you can't quite make out the penmanship (rendered with a very finely-nibbed pen):

The responses: (1) a coach and four (a coach pulled by four horses); (2) a fine house, (3) a husband, (4) to be beloved, (5) to leave school, (6) to be admired, (7) a white and pretty hand, (8) to read an interesting book [but not book-plural?], (9) to excel, (10) to be married, (11) a lover, (12) a ride on horse back, (13) to go to a ball, (14) a sail by moonlight, (15) an offer of marriage, (16) to go to a party, (17) pretty eyes, (18) a small and pretty foot, (19) a ride with good company, (20) to be married to the one I love, (21) a new dress, (22) a ride with a certain person, (23) to teach, (24) a walk by the moonlight with you, (25) to be a belle, (26) to supplant my rivals, (27) a pretty face, (28) to see the one I love best, (29) to be accomplished, (30) to make a good appearance, (31) to learn instrumental music, (32 )to attend a concert, (33) to go to Bangor, (34) an invitation to a wedding, (35) a present of a book, (36) to give a ball, (37) to see my best friend, (38) a letter from my lover, (39) to visit Europe, (40) a pretty wife.

In general, the things on the wish-list of ardent wishes were mostly about experiences (13 or 14 things), followed closely by wishes in relationship(s) with 9 or 10; physical attributes (6 hits), and other bits and pieces. It is interesting that of the 40 choices there are only four that deal with physical things.

It is an enchanting list, especially when you realize that it isn't as antiquarian as it seems, with the overwhelming majority of the wishes being easily wishable today--probably as they have always been.

Medusa was supposed to be hideous--scary, revolting. Most of the time though the images I see of her make her look quite attractive--and very strong. She was one of the gorgon sisters, child of Gaea and Oceanus, who in the short run feel for Poseidon and broke her rules of chastity, and for which was terrifically punished by Athena to the fate we know today.

This is a detail from the following engraving, which I can't yet identify, though I reckon it to be early/mid-19th century:

It is a striking image, and if I translate the caption correctly it was one that you would see in the bottom of a glass/drinking vessel.

July 08, 2015

Even though WWII in the Pacific was ended on 15 August 1945 (or at least the surrender was initiated then) and the surrender papers signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 ("VJ Day"), there were many elements of the Japanese Army that took weeks and in some cases months to actually lay down their weapons and submit. (There are some rare cases of individual soldiers lasting for years and decades past the surrender, refusing to give in, living their lives in remote places.)

This document--"Headquarter / United States Army Forces Western Pacific / Public Relations Office / General Release - 47, APO 707, 23 September 1945"--released by the propaganda/public relations office of the U.S. Army Force Western Pacific, details some of the process of large forces of Japanese forces in the Philippines coming in to surrender.

Stating that 31,000 Japanese soldiers (and 17 generals) had already been placed under guard in Luzon's POW camps, the three-paragraph document ends with this interesting statement:

"No date has yet been set when it is expected all the Japanese in the hills will be in our hands."